The Republicans who spread that rumor didn’t care whether it was true, and was looking for choice rumors to spread.

It’s blood libel for the 21st century.

I think the state in this case needs to be divided into adversarial and non-adversarial departments (or subdepartments). It’s better to tell (for example) the water department you don’t know whether the pipes are lead if that’s the case, rather than forcing them to unearth copper pipes or letting them leave lead pipes.

But it is absolutely appropriate (assuming you believe in strong rights to privacy) to insert NSA keywords into benign communications, so that NSA wastes time on your false positives, but that’s because NSA isn’t supposed to be doing mass surveillance of the public, rather is supposed to be helping develop communication security that is impervious to surveillance.

If your local precinct actually works with the community, doesn’t harass minorities and doesn’t rob civilians via asset forfeiture, it might be worth giving them sound information (including saying you don’t know what you don’t know.) On the other hand if it behaves typically for law enforcement in the US, leading them to chase geese will save everyone else trouble.

Both!

I’m really pissed off right now, at both US political parties, at human nature, at a lot of things, so this may not be the best time for me to sound off on a question like this. This may go long. I get into some grizzly topics like Suicide, the Holocaust and how laziness is a fake thing invented by capitalists and Calvinists.

So I learned early on the fucked up nature of capitalism and the laziness rhetoric accompanied with the Protestant work ethic. My parents were glad to criticize my avolition (that’s the medical term for the symptom of not wanting to do anything), but then I was suffering from neglect on account that they both worked full work weeks and were too exhausted to parent.

This is to say, mental illness and family dysfunction often are intergenerational. They were also driven by their parents to work themselves to exhaustion, and they did, and I became a stereotypical gen-x latchkey kid. Anyway, Mom tried an experiment, of paying me by the chore rather than a weekly allowance while I’d have regular house-chore duties. She’d then not pay me if my work was not up to snuff, and I learned quickly that all my efforts couldn’t get it to snuff (I really tried, but I was a kid, and she wasn’t good at telling me what she wanted). Resigned to have no allowance, I stopped working, entirely, and that just wouldn’t do.

I wouldn’t be diagnosed with Major Depression until my adulthood, and I’d discover that at my most symptomatic, I could lay down in bed for months, barely able to get up to eat or poop and having the libido of a lump of granite and the inertia of a neutron star.

Contrast the people who lucked out in The Great Resignation of 2021. During the COVID-19 Lockdown, people defied their industrialist bosses and Calvinist ministers and found they could not couch potato out for more than a week or two without getting a severe case of cabin fever. (People who winter in high-snow areas already know this phenomenon, and Steven King’s The Shining is inspired by centuries of worst case scenarios.) Most people took up hobbies, turned their houses into lego parks, took up wood carving or cooking or something, and a lot of those things became marketable skills, hence a lot of Take this job and shove it and a sudden dearth of people willing to suffer abuse, toxic workspaces and a less-than-sustenance wage.

Laziness isn’t a thing. If someone is healthy and happy, they’ll do all the chores. Granted some chores are tedious or arduous or hazardous. In my pinko communist fantasies, I imagine we take some queues hfrom Power Wash Simulator until we figure out how to automate the process, and then automate the maintenance and repair of the machines that do that job, then automate maintenance of the bots that do the maintenance and repair until one guy keeps an eye on the one dial while writing poetry.

Speaking of communism, Marx predicted enshiffication of products and jobs in Das Kapital and our industrialist masters made it clear they liked it when the working class was living in Hoover towns (of cardboard boxes and paint cans) and eating flour paste (and dying of malnutrition). And they don’t mind at all that their employees need food stamps and are living in their car (and sleeping roughly).

There’s a cute bit in the John Scalzi short story Morning Announcements at the Lucas Interspecies School for Troubled Youth where the announcer (not the principal) is talking about the graduating class, and his well wishes and high hopes for them. And then he notes one species_who will, after graduation, be bussed to the downtown stadium to begin mating challenges that will leave nine out of ten of you dead…_

That’s us. Human beings, in capitalism. There’s never enough work. Allegations of meritocracy imply that the least of us will be unfit and will be disposed of like Spartans tossing their imperfect infants into the Kaiadas cave chasm to perish on the rocks. The beggars, widows and orphans we’re supposed to watch out for (and is why Sodom was firebombed in myth) we leave to languish in homelessness, or in prison for failing to fit in and work hard enough.

And here in the states that class of undesirables continues to expand.

Granted more than 10% of us persevere, but somewhere between 66% and 88% of US households live in precarity, which means they worry every night about whether the next week is their last. Most of us are not within the hunky-dory threshold, by far.

In my case, staring blankly at the recent US general election results, I know I don’t want to end up homeless, or arrested and in a detention center (whether stuck in a crowded cell, compelled to forced labor or awaiting my turn in the genocide machine). I’m far away from these outcomes for the moment, but the coming administration makes my fate a lot more unpredictable. So I’m looking for an L-pill or other functional exit strategy, in case I need to evade arrest once I am unpersoned.

And this has led me to an interesting discovery. Society doesn’t want to think about its casualties. I deal with suicidality every day. Usually it’s just considering it. But even professional therapists tend to freak out when I talk about it. Also, in the aughts, I went on a deep dive into the Holocaust, what steps were taken from the concentration camps started by Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst to the Pogroms along the eastern front to the massive extermination machine of Auschwitz. So I’m familiar that societies don’t mind deaths when they happen quietly in the cold, or in the systems. They mind them when they’re out front and messy and require a lot of cleanup. This is why self-immolation protests are terrifying, and even though there’s not enough of them to change hearts and minds, they are a wake up call that our autocratic masters fear.

In reality, the US is suffering from a suicide epidemic. Our rate (about 40K a year in the 2010s and climbing) is worse than Japan (who is much more okay with suicide, though they’re trying to change that) and worse than Russia (Russia’s having a no-good very bad…Putin). For every one dead body from suicide, another three or four end up in the emergency room for trying, but survive, or are stopped by a friend. Also we’re pretty sure some families will obfuscate the cause of death and attribute it to accident (or in David Carradine’s case, literal ninjas) so they don’t have to deal with the public questions about suicide.

But curiously life does suck for most of us, and we’re waiting our turn in the showers, or out in the cold, or ultimately for the water to run out so we can’t make enough food.

I’m not going to advocate harming yourself or others, but I will say playing by the rules is silly, and there’s no way they’ll let you into the cool kids club. Ever. You were never meant to win. Go arty. Go renegade. Go crazy. Go unpredictable.

I’m tired. I’ll give this a grammar pass later.

Relevant conversation from 2016

Oh good, so different from using Terrorists to justify the surveillance state.

Speaking of which the NSA Haiku Generator has been lifeboated!

Consul Leak Toxic
DDOS Agro Burst
Hazmat Ebola

Our surveillance goons are bored and lonely! Give them something to scan every day! 👋

I guess it’s not premium enough.

It reminds me of Unlimited data mobile services in which the data is not turned off or surcharged but throttled to a crawl after a limited time. We’ve not since been able to get a straight answer from any of the major telecom providers.

Marx predicts enshittification in Das Kapital

Sure!

So my original fantasy (during the Obama era) was to create what would start as an wiki of all^† the constitutions of all nations of the world, translated to all^† languages.

Then there’d be a workshop section where amateur legal experts could take known clauses and tweak them so that they’d be better (say, revising all the US federal elections so that they’re ranked choice, and fixing all the instances of two-party procedure so that they accommodate any number of parties. Or, for another example, fixing UK Parliament so that it is appointed by sortition from all qualifying citizens.)

The point of all this when the world isn’t on the precipice of despair is twofold:

1) It provides a resource for new societies to look at what other constitutions look like, so they can pull from what works, which means that coups d’etat are more likely to result in something other than a provisional dictatorship that accidentally becomes permanent. Because we have new states rising from the ashes of the old frequently. And…

2) It provides a place to crowdsource amendments to constitutions already in place (or to change current non-foundational ordinances). Right now, here in the US, we depend on our legislators to write laws, and they rely on their staffers who often have corporate allegiances, when they don’t receive bill text directly from corporate or special interest lobbyists directly. So it would create a place for the public to talk about it and have its own input.

Such a website was a no-brainer to me, so much so that I had assumed that it existed somewhere online. But no, no-one has made it.

I don’t have the skill it takes to start what might eventually become a sizeable project with lots of political enemies, like Wikipedia or Wikileaks. But maybe here on Lemmy creating an interested team would be easier.

For now it’s a pie-in-the-sky idea, as I wouldn’t have any idea how to begin it.

† This is the internet definition of all, id est as many as we could crowdsource.

This was the norm far longer than not. Only nobles rich enough to have washer servants would wear undergarments. The rest of us enjoyed brisk breezes betwixt our nethers.

I have multiple pairs of underwear but I hate h going to a laundromat, so I used to wait until I was absolutely out of everything and the clothes I was wearing were oversoiled.

I have laundry facilities at home now, but when I’m double-plus depressed, I still will wait until I have absolutely nothing to wear.

As best as we understand the motivation of the constituency, they felt the economy was bad under Biden, that immigrants were increasing crime, weighing down our social programs and taking our jobs, and that Trump will fix everything with his concept of a plan.

In reality, Biden was dealing with the after-effects of Trump’s economy, plus the COVID-19 epidemic, and while prices did increase, the US has recovered better than any other nation, so he can’t really be faulted on the economy, especially after Trump’s initial response to the epidemic of pretending like it’s not already in the community, and politicizing mitigation efforts like masks and social distancing.

Then, immigrants are taking jobs that Americans don’t want, are paying taxes, and commit fewer crimes than the general population. So all of our concerns about immigrants are demonstrably false.

And if Trump’s previous methods of fixing the United States is consistent, then he’s only going to break things. An example would be his efforts to repeal the ACA, which turned into the skinny repeal that is, killing the program without a replacement, because making a better healthcare program was too hard for the GOP.

I remember all this, and it’s troubling the short memories of the American electorate. It’s not the first time, though. They should have remember not just how bad it was under George W. Bush, but how awful Republicans became during that time. Street Republicans were outwardly endorsing torture and suggesting that waterboarding wasn’t really torture. It’s like they lost all moral direction or even basic sense in favor of party loyalty.

Now as more votes are processed, and as we’re able to see how demographics voted, our review of the 2024 election might change, but right now it looks like huge chunks of the electorate are just forgetful and completely daft. More likely they’re just racist and bigoted more than they care about their own self interests.

If they got it they’d know that putting a Democrat in office and then pressuring them can get results, which is how we ended DADT and DoMA. The GOP doesn’t care what the public thinks.

It’s worth tapping the quote (accredited) from Linden Baines Johnson:

I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

The military may well be on our side, even if Trump decides to schedule-F all the top brass and replace them with loyalists, the officers that follow them are likely to have differing opinions of what constitutes a legal order.

From the top of the GOP down, Trump is a useful idiot, but difficult to handle. As I noted on NCD ( Sorry about the dumb link ) Trump is actually eager to nuke the snot out of someone, unable to regard the consequences. (He may be unable to consider the consequences, but I can’t make that assessment.) It’s going to be up to the commanders down the chain to find a way to ignore those orders, or delay them until someone up the chain of command comes to their senses.

That said, I suspect they might run out of patience, especially if they’re sent to attack Americans (we’re still wary after the anti-riot deployments during the civil rights movement). While I can’t expect US armed forces to take sides in a civil war, they can certainly intervene to stop smaller military units from engaging.

There weren’t trans boxers in the 2024 Women’s Olympics, but many far-right commenters accused two boxers of being trans.

It shows us it’s not really about trans people at all, but anyone for whom they can gin up contempt for, among their followers.

Wokeness is about people understanding power structures like these. If you’re not woke, you don’t get how systemic stratification assures that those born in privilege stay in privilege, and those who aren’t are thwarted by more than luck.

Wokeness also includes understanding that in hyperconformist societies such as the US under the MAGA culture war, out-groups expand while mainstream in-groups contract.

It means unless you are a billionaire or providing irreplaceable service for one, you’re going to end up amobg the out-groups. And once the purge effort gets underway, it can be very dangerous for you and for anyone who knows you.

Unlike prior revolutions in which the new regime was established after the old, we should write a new constitution in advance.

Start with a framework. Maybe take the Constitution of the United States and make some no-brainer changes (getting rid of the EC, say. Or election by ranked choice)

And then, we develop it. Run clauses by legal scholars, hold town halls. Get it on the web. Debate about the benefits of competing clause versions.

So that when there is a movement, a resistance (and there will be) an organized rebellion, the people will not just have an enemy to fight against but something to fight for.

The DNC often deals with this, because the nature of federal politics in the US requires them to appeal to the general public, which has left-leaning interests, and then businesses and oligarchs for sponsorship which have right-leaning interests.

Remember they made the Democratic Party primaries less democratic after Carter was elected because he was too left wing. And they’ve only been able to nominate neoliberals since.

So no, those of us on the left have no candidates. And since its a two-party FPTP system, we only can vote against the worse popular guy by voting for the slightly better other popular guy.

In this case, assuming the election went down as it appeared, the majority of the US voted for the racist autocratic dictator rather than another neolib. (Granted, Biden went further left than we expected and I had hope Harris would as well. Walz certainly seems to understand the US public, but none of them are without ties to industrial interests. We’d still only be able to expect a couple of scraps.)

What this tells me is that most Americans don’t get it. They think they have a choice. And now they’re going to endure the consequences of their folly.

to keep games safe

Really ups the clarion call to pirate the hell out of it (or not play it at all).

< English language not allowed… again. LEMMY IS WEIRD. >

Hard Habit To Break by Chicago is pretty straightforward, but I liked it on the radio as a kid because it’s peppy and has an orchestra.

Decades later I get access to music service libraries and give it a listen.

I was a jerk and you left me, and now you’re with another guy. I’m not sorry. I’m not going to do better. But I have an orchestra!

I still like it, but have perspective now.

Behind the Bastards did a good one two-parter recently on liberal media which helped the rise of the NSDAP party, and how that compares with US politics today. Even Jewish owned newspapers identified more with elites than Jewish commoners, and so were happy to underreport the violence and hate rhetoric of the National Socialist German Workers Party, even when they were literally gunning down communists and labor unionists.

The media agencies do not identify with the common public even today, which is why we still rely on blogs and curators, and have to cross reference news stories to see what the common reported facts are, and if they’re consistent from different primary sources. This process is a necessary artifact from the George W. Bush administration and the international war on terror, which was already a foray by the US into fascist rhetoric and autocracy. From then it’s been Secret Hitlers all the way down.

So this is to say this is totally on brand for the media. And as the election has now shown us (hindsight being 20/20) this is totally on brand for the US public.

A dark age is a low-data age. It’s not dark as in a slow development age. We see the end of the Islamic Golden Age (areound the 14th-15 centuries) as as time when advancement in the Middle East slowed as astronomy and algebra were reinterpreted as sorcery against God (except when done for the religious authority or the caliphate / sultanate). Compare witchcraft and witch burnings in the late middle ages and early reniassance. Anyhow a lot of smart people got executed by the religious authority, and so development slowed, allowing Christian imperial interests from the west to catch up.

This won’t be a dark age even as the US state tries to bury what happens in disinformation campaigns. There’s too much archeological data to be available. Though future civilizations may not prioritize studying what happened while we navigate some great filters like the climate crisis.

It’s going to suck and people will die, and some atrocities will be so heinous as to require memorials and denial movements, but it will be super hard to bury the records.

The US is going to join Russia as a has-been, but it was always a genocidal bully, and deserves to crumble like Rome.

Because of course it did?

This was super-expected.